


Lacuna

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Domestic, F/F, Lies, People Watching, everything is a metaphor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-10
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-07-14 04:58:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7154519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Breakfast: tea and terrible coffee and things spread on toast, jams and butters and hazelnut spread, and lies told about people they don’t know.</p>
<p>Janine is very good at it. Mary wonders if that should worry her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lacuna

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beyonces_fiancee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beyonces_fiancee/gifts).



Janine’s flat has one large window in the front and no curtains. Mary remembers being surprised by that, the first time she was round, but it’s something of a pleasure now to sit, the two of them, at the table by the window and tell the stories of all the people passing by, three floors below. Breakfast: tea and terrible coffee and things spread on toast, jams and butters and hazelnut spread, and lies told about people they don’t know.

Janine is very good at it. Mary wonders if that should worry her.

Instead, Mary listens when Janine rants about her jerk boss, murmurs sympathy, and mentally files away every piece of information. Instead, she judiciously copies every scrap of paper Janine brings home onto a usb drive and keeps an encrypted file where she pieces together Magnussen’s calendar and associates. Instead, she kisses Janine one night over a takeaway and then sleeps every Friday and most Saturday nights for _two sodding years_ instead of looking for multiple sources.

Instead, she falls mostly in love.

“We’ve seen him before,” Janine says through a mouth of crumbs. Mary hasn’t been looking out the window; she’s glancing through a Telegraph story about that internet detective who killed himself. “Yer man there, with the hat,” Janine says when Mary finally looks up. She points with her mug, tea sloshing close to the edge. 

“The one having an affair with his boss?”

“Mmm. I’m not so sure, now.” Janine peers thoughtfully at him as he crosses the street and drops his paper coffee cup in a rubbish bin. The furrows above her nose deepen when she’s considering; there is still crusty bits of sleep in the corner of her eyes and dark smudges where she hasn’t got yesterday’s eyeliner rubbed away. They’d been out at a cabaret, a friend of a friend of Janine’s, and she’d stepped to her front door to great Mary in a dress so deep blue it nearly met black and fitted snug tight against her body.

They’d been late to the cabaret, and left as soon as the curtain went down. 

“I think he might be a secret agent,” Janine continues.

“Really?” He’s too sloppy to be an agent; he never looks around him, nearly got hit by a taxi the second time they saw him.

“He always drops his cup in the same rubbish bin.” Janine raised her eyebrow significantly. She’s baiting Mary, who always eschews her penchant for more elaborate and intrigue-filled lives for their passers-by in favor of deeply mundane, even banal trivialities. 

“Spies don’t really do that anymore,” she says. “Depending on who your informant is, of course, but people find it a bit fishy to see some bloke picking through the rubbish. Identity theft and all that,” she adds, keeping her face – not Mary Morstan’s face, one might add – quite placid. 

“Hmm.” Janine considers. “He throws it away because his boyfriend lives right around the corner, and he loves to make him coffee when he comes ‘round, but it’s always terrible, so he buys one at a café first.”

Mary snorts, looks down at her mug. She still hasn’t come over with a new machine and a bag of coffee beans that cost more than five pounds, though she’s threatened to often enough. Janine still makes her a desultory drip each time she’s there.

“The bad coffee’s grown on him,” she says. “He drinks less and less of the one from the café; I predict that in a fortnight he will have given it up entirely.” She takes a deep, theatrical gulp from her mug.

Janine rolls her eyes. “Just a creature of habit, then?”

“Habits are easy to form,” Mary says with a shrug. “Doesn’t mean they’re not true.”


End file.
